Time Management skills
I have horrible time management skills. You can ask anyone that knows me (esp. my wife). I’m trying to figure out the root cause of this, and I think it actually goes beyond just managing my time.
Let’s take for instance theath. That mofo somehow writes 3 blog entries a week. I, on the other hand, just saw that my last one was more than a month ago. However, that’s not really true. I have probably written 5 or so entries in the mean time, I just don’t ever finish them, then shutdown my computer and lose them (or they are chilling in my drafts folder). By the time I get back around to finishing it, it’s either not relevant or I’ve changed my mind.
Maybe I can chalk this up to being lazy, or the fact that 1 person reads this blog so my priorities put blogging right below getting a haircut (which I haven’t had in about a month because I can’t find the time). But I’m pretty sure the real reason is 2 fold.
1)I work too much. That’s a fact, and obviously contributes to my bad hygiene and low blog post count. I put work very high in my priority list (probably too high). I don’t like to see things go undone, and working with people that put work at a lower priority means a lot of things don’t get done. So I work until they are done. Then I look up and see it’s 2am and I haven’t eaten dinner and I have to be up at 6:30am. Then I’m mad at myself, but I’m digressing.
2)I multi-task too much. I try to keep so much stuff in my brain that I forget about 80% of things not related to my focus (btw I just had to save this draft and go help a guy set up LiveMeeting and Tomcat, but I’m back now). So this means that in a given day I will have 100 planned tasks ordered by priority, but at any given free moment when I’m trying to decide the next thing to do, I can only think of 20 of them, so I pick the highest priority out of those 20.
I don’t think I really had a point to this story except maybe that I think I have trained my brain to specialize in context switching, and in doing that I have lost the ability to remember things. All 100 items are in my brain and they all have their context with them, but I only have pointers to 20 of them. I wonder if I can retrain it, or if I need to change occupations first.
Well, since I made it to the end of this blog I guess this story will actually get posted.
You know, I felt like I had the same problem for a long time. Then I just gave up. It actually came from reading this:
http://www.43folders.com/2007/12/31/death-and-underachievement-guide-happiness-work
Essentially, there’s always going to be more shit to do, and you’re always going to find complications in everything you do, so just embrace it and do what you want (obviously, with responsibilities).
So to that end, I’ve decided that I can’t code everything. So I mooch off open source. It also sucks in that case that I’m your business partner and will go a week and think “wow, I did absolutely nothing for our project this week. Oh well.”
I can’t build everything, but the fun stuff, I’ll try to make time to do. The rest of it, I’ll pay someone to do it. That’s why I make money, really, to allow me to use my time in different capacities (I’ll trade 40 hours of my coding time for 90 hours of your tile work, kthx).
Nate’s only going to be an infant once, and I’m not that great at this one, but I try to get in some good time with him at least once a day (Sara gets a ton, but I’ve got other stuff to handle). Like chasing him or playing time, not just watching him.
Also, I found having some sort of todolist that you can put things onto but don’t have to look at all the time is great, because then you’re not responsible for keeping all of that in your head. It means I won’t handle it today most likely, but I’ll get around to it.
I think if anybody takes on all the work put in front of them, they’ll end up not just not doing most of the work well, but missing out on lots of fun along the way. So to me, it’s like “fuck it, I’ll just say no and accept that 40% of the things given to me aren’t important, and then prioritize the other 60%. If someone doesn’t like it, they can do it themselves.”
Oh, and that essay is awesome. Since you have good time management skills, I’m sure you’ll get it in.
Oh#2, Ruby makes coding faster. Suck on that, Java.
Oh#3, I started just deleting or archiving like a fiend in my email. If I’ve handled it, it gets deleted. If I haven’t, it stays there.
If there’s not a good chance I’ll handle it, it gets forwarded or deleted.
It makes me feel accomplished, even if I’m not. My inbox is empty. Ftw.